Pittsburgh: A city of two post-industrial tales

Author

Disclosure statement

Allen Dieterich-Ward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

But the former Steel City’s success has proven to be uneven across racial and class lines. The recovery has also proven difficult to replicate in the former mill towns and outlying rural mining areas that once provided the raw materials upon which its fortunes were made. In my book, “Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America,” I take readers on two tours of the region that shed light on the divided responses to Trump’s opposition to the global climate accord.

The promise of transformation

On the first tour in my book, we view the history of Pittsburgh through a lens similar to that used by longtime city mayor Richard Caliguiri, who served from 1977 to 1988. For him, for development officials, and for many of the residents employed outside traditional industries, Rust Belt imagery rooted in the dirty, blue-collar mill towns was a barrier to recruiting talent and attracting new businesses.

Rivers that had served as industrial canals and sewers for more than a century were clean enough to enjoy, helping encourage environmental stewardship. Campaigns to reuse industrial age buildings and to repurpose railroad corridors as riverfront recreational trails further helped cement Pittsburgh’s new post-industrial identity.

An aerial view of Summerset at Frick Park, a residential area built on an old slag heap.Lyndasw, CC BY

The tour in my book takes readers through suburban research campuses, office buildings and residential areas that would not be out of place in other prosperous parts of the nation. Entering the city proper, triumphant symbols of economic and environmental transformation are everywhere; among the examples are Summerset at Frick Park, a new urbanist residential area erected on top of a reclaimed slag pile, and the Pittsburgh Technology Center, built by a public-private consortium on the former site of an enormous riverfront mill. The Hot Metal Bridge, which once carried molten iron across the Monongahela River, now gives students and workers a healthy and eco-friendly route to walk or bike from the university center of Oakland to the hip neighborhoods of the city’s South Side.

From the Hot Metal Bridge pedestrian walkway, the offices of the American Eagle Outfitters clothing chain are visible in the background, part of a mixed-use development built on the site of a former steel mill.Dllu, CC BY-SA

If the tour was limited to these neighborhoods, the Pittsburgh revitalization might seem an unqualified success.

Sticking with tradition

Forty miles upstream, however, my book’s second tour heads to the deindustrialized communities of Charleroi, Monessen and Donora. The population is dwindling, and those who remain continue to struggle with high poverty and unemployment rates. Gravel and rock piles and a loading dock on the Monongahela’s western bank share the panorama with the hulking mass of the Speers Railroad Bridge. While a little rusty, this span still carries the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway as it transports freight to and from five different mills and those employees fortunate enough to still work in them.

Many residents came to value the Steel City’s improving rivers, cleaner skies and scenic woodlands. And yet, in 1985, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland announced, “Pittsburgh looks beautiful. But I’d like to see it a little dirtier, a little more smoke. The most environmentally offensive thing I see is the shut-down mills.”

The rusting hulk of the Carrie Furnace, a remnant of an industrial past now being reborn as a museum and mixed-use development site.brookward/flickr, CC BY-NC

From this perspective, the post-industrial reinvention of the region offered only low-paid service work or the hazy idea of job retraining. What good were pretty views and playgrounds for white-collar workers without a solution to the loss of unionized, family-wage blue-collar jobs?

The number of active wells in southwestern Pennsylvania quadrupled from 2008 to 2012. The fracking boom prompted a renaissance of reindustrialization with opportunities for jobs in the energy, chemical and metals sectors. But, a fracking downturn beginning in 2015 caused economic anxieties to rush back to the surface. Many locals worried that their financial recovery was threatened by global economic forces beyond their control or, more sinisterly, environmental activists accused of favoring polar bears above people.

As president, Obama made multiple trips to the city of Pittsburgh, touting its economic reinvention – including that G-20 conference in 2009. But neither he nor Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign ever found their way to these old bastions of the Democratic Party. Trump did. In June 2016, he arrived in Monessen to acknowledge the “very, very tough times” and assure residents he would “make it better fast.”

For those left out of the promise of a post-industrial Pittsburgh reborn through environmental stewardship and a high-tech economy, Trump’s simplistic but powerful message of reindustrialization, economic protectionism and environmental deregulation often resonates with their own lives and dreams for the future. That may even have helped him win Westmoreland County, just east of Pittsburgh. But it remains unclear how the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement will actually serve to make their lives materially better. At the least, it reminds those of us who have navigated the winds of economic change successfully of the consequences for ignoring the needs of those struggling to find a safe harbor.